OTHER VOICES

More transparency for Nazi-confiscated art

A combination of handout photos of a selection of artworks published on the German government website "Lost Art" on November 12, 2013. Germany began publishing an online list of works that were discovered in a huge art stash in a Munich flat last year and believed for the most part to have been stolen or extorted by the Nazis.

Posted Nov. 12, 2013, at 2:35 p.m.

What began as a normal customs check aboard a train in Central Europe has exploded into the most spectacular discovery in recent memory of art stolen during the Nazi era — one that now poses a test of the international community’s capacity to account for and restore valuable property looted from Jews and others during the Holocaust.

In February 2012, Bavarian police investigating a Munich recluse, Cornelius Gurlitt, for traveling with a suspiciously large amount of cash, stumbled upon more than 1,400 pieces of art in his trash-strewn Munich apartment. The trove included works by Picasso, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and modern German artists whose works had been labeled “degenerate” by the Hitler regime.

Gurlitt’s art stash was apparently bequeathed to him by his father, the late Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who had been purged from museum jobs because of his partially Jewish origins, but who later helped the Nazis peddle confiscated “degenerate” art to raise cash for the regime.

Bavaria’s law enforcement authorities are coming under fire for not revealing the existence of the paintings until Monday, after a German magazine, Focus, published a story about the case. The German federal government knew about the paintings a few months ago.

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We’ll take the authorities’ explanation for the lack of disclosure — that they were trying to protect the integrity of a criminal investigation — at face value. What’s most important is how German authorities handle the situation from here on.

Germany, like the United States, is a signatory to the 1998 Washington Conference Principles, which commit countries to promote transparency and restitution with respect to Nazi-confiscated art. Appropriately, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has said it will act consistently with those principles. In our view, that would mean providing all the expertise, funding and political will Berlin can muster to ensure a thorough and fair resolution of what is already anything but a routine matter.